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6 things that take your UX from above average to world class

4 min read

Many parts of applications are rarely experienced, yet we have to consider how the presence or absence of these states affect a user’s experience. It’s the UX designer’s job to go beyond visual design and make the best experience possible—including all the parts of the experience that nobody thinks to design.

Onboarding

The first thing your user experiences is onboarding. The knee-jerk response to onboarding is to darken everything besides the button the user should click on, make detailed instructions telling the user how this button is used, and repeat for each button.

Standard. Easy. Done. Right? Wrong.

“‘I wish this app had a splash page,’ said no one ever.”

For one, nobody remembers all those tips along the way—they just click right through because they want to get to the experience. Secondly, you should have created an experience that’s so easy, the user’s only choice is to be right. If your design is so complex that users need a step-by-step walk through, you need to reconsider what you’ve created.

The best way to onboard a user is to not onboard them at all. Let the user dive right into the experience and play around, free of anxiety or fear that they might get lost and not know what to do.

Tips for a better onboarding experience

Don’t interrupt the user’s experience just because you want their data. Users know you make your money off their data, and they’re not as excited to give it out as you are to take it. If you’re going to ask for info, make sure the user feels like they’ve gotten something in return.

“The best way to onboard a user: don’t onboard them at all.”

Form fields

Form fields are often the hardest to design, both from a design and a code perspective. From a design perspective they have to be fairly straight forward so they’re understandable, and from a code perspective they’re pretty much the farthest behind of all HTML elements in terms of ability to customize.

However, form fields are often one of the most crucial pieces of your site or application—they’re where you get info from your users. If your form fields create a poor experience for your user you need to reconsider what you’re doing.

404 errors

The 404 page is one of the most forgotten experiences outside of empty states. While it is our hope that users will never have to see the 404 error as long as the experience is developed well, we can’t just forget about it. The 404 page is one of the best places to turn a frustrated user into a delighted, returning user.

Empty states

An empty state can include the view a user experiences when they first arrive on a screen, the view they see when they zero out their inbox, the loading screen, and many more. You can consider an empty state pretty much any state that has no data to interact with.

Tips for better empty states

Distract the user from excessive load times with dummy content or entertaining animations

Notifications

Lastly, when creating the best experience possible we can’t forget about notifications. Why does our user need to be notified, when do they need to be notified, and how?

So much data is involved in notifications, yet they’re often the most overlooked part of our application because they aren’t states our users experience within the app. Notifications represent the experience beyond the interface, and only the best UX designers consider how they fit in the experience they’re designing.

“We need to consider how notifications fit into the experience we’re designing.”

My favorite basketball team is the Golden State Warriors, but I’m a busy man and I don’t always notice when things outside of my immediate attention are happening. ESPN allows me to customize my notifications so that I receive alerts about what is happening with my favorite team(s). But they don’t just send me every notification in their system, they allow me to choose which ones I want.

Beyond team notifications, I can set notifications per game as well.

The control ESPN gives me when it comes to managing my sports news and information is incredibly well thought through. It makes me feel important and like I’m in control of my experience, not someone that created the app.

Tips for better notifications

Ask users what kind of content they want to be notified about

Ask your users whether there’s a specific time of day they want to be notified or if they want notifications to be real time

Monitor your analytics to find out if your notifications are increasing the KPIs you hoped they would. If they’re not, figure out how they should change based on that data.

With the amount of data we’re sending, receiving, and tracking daily, with the availability of users and test users, with all the inspiration out there on the web, there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be doing these 6 things well. The details are what separate the good UX designers from the great.

Former Experience Design consultant for R/GA at Google, Joe now runs a 501(c)(3) non-profit called Design Good that is working to make the Internet safe and re-establish trust in consumers. If you want to keep up with what he's doing outside of InVision, email him at joe@designgood.tech or follow him on Twitter or Medium!